The punk song Johnny Marr called a “massive wake up call”
By the time that the 1970s ended, punk was the kick in the ass that rock and roll needed. Sure, bands could still play and had impressive chops, all things considered, but it seemed like the idea of being a rock god was becoming too far out of reach for most modest fans of the genre. Suddenly, it was okay to make things simple, and Johnny Marr remembered getting woken up when hearing Buzzcocks for the first time.
Punk was not meant to sound pretty, though. Just listen to any ten seconds of a Sex Pistols song, and you’ll know that John Lydon wasn’t really looking to make the audience marvel at his great voice. However, that didn’t mean that every band had to go through life trying to half-ass their material.
Whereas the Stone Age of punk focused on old-time rock and roll as their basis, Buzzcocks seemed to be pop fans before anything else. They still had the same clothing and aesthetic as punk rock, but what they were doing seemed to fall in line with what the early days of pop-rock sounded like.
For Marr, his conversion moment came when he heard ‘Autonomy’ for the first time, telling Line of Best Fit, “[It] was a massive wakeup call for me. I bought the album the day it came out, I got the bus after school, and it was in a silver plastic bag. When I got home and put it on, I knew the singles, but when I got to ‘Autonomy’, it was genuinely a new kind of rock music”.
Considering how well they focused on hooks, it’s no surprise that one of Buzzcocks’ most celebrated albums is the compilation Singles Going Steady. They may have put a lot of time and effort into letting an album flow from one song to the next, but the best way to actually get in touch with their roots was to just have an album of short, punchy songs that never let up.
There were also more than a few times when they almost seemed to become adventurous by accident. Since every song was based on different familiar chord progressions, some of the more interesting moments came when the song either wasn’t perfectly in tune, or they hit a chord that didn’t fit with the song at all but just felt right at the moment.
Whereas most guitarists would just try to get the basic chords under their fingers, Marr was more interested in delving a little deeper into the sonics behind the record. If you look through the early days of The Smiths, like ‘This Charming Man’, Marr is toying with his sound like Buzzcocks did, either adding different extensions to the chords or trying out strange tunings for songs and seeing how much of a tune he could get out of it.
Considering where punk rock went afterwards, it would also be fair to call Buzzcocks the first true pop-punk band, with artists like Green Day using that same power pop style and making it more snotty decades later. Marr was in it for the songs, though, and after hearing ‘Autonomy’ works its way into his brain, he was about to take on the music world with a fire in his heart.
